


Engulfed In Something Other Than Your Arms

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, POV Sherlock Holmes, warning: two idiots petrified of falling in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-07-17
Packaged: 2018-02-09 07:35:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1974384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Suffocate, asphyxiate; my own hands around my neck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Engulfed In Something Other Than Your Arms

Your hands - your hands spinning towards me and your face getting darker and darker as it fades to nothing behind us. I need to taste the curve of your cheek and tip myself ever so slightly off the precipice so that you might see me, truly, for the first time. 

It’s dangerous, don’t tell me it’s dangerous. I know what I want to put at risk but I am swamped by everything I notice about you so surely - surely - this is the safest path to walk. Remember when we danced alone, somewhat emptily in an empty room, and I could feel the understated curve of your bicep under my palm; it was like I was trying to swim in something other than three-dimensional ocean-- do you remember? You closed your eyes and I suppose you were imagining me shorter and lighter and someone other than myself, but it happened, it really happened nonetheless. See, and here’s the difference, when I closed my eyes in turn I saw no one other than you and felt no one other than myself because I knew, really, it was me pretending to be halfway to full dancing alone in an empty room and you weren’t even there, you weren’t even there, but do you remember it? Because it happened. It did. 

Deadly, deadly, I’m forcing myself into something - some thoughts - deadlier than we already are. I do have you but I want you in completeness and in certain tandem with myself, I want to catalog your every external cell, I want, I want-- I just want. Let’s run away, let’s take a bike between us and take turns to push it into the sea and when we get there we’ll keep going and keep going until we’re half submerged but it won’t matter that we can barely breathe because your hand will still be in mine. Maybe then you’ll properly see me. But of course, true to form, if we did run away I wouldn’t be able to tell you that we had.

I need to be soft, I need to be well-fed, I need to be deadly. There are so many things that you need me to be and I’m not quite sure I can- that I can. Myself, me in the now and the idea of myself; it’s sedentary. I’m not sure I could change for anyone, like I’m a rock on the edge of a cliff, jutting out into the liberating nothing with grass dying around my feet. But it scares me that, if you asked me to accommodate all of our differences or diminish corners of my worser traits, well. I would.

Sometimes I wish I could be your hands so I could learn to touch as gently as you and sometimes I wish I could destroy you and me both in something stronger than a storm of atoms and breathing so that we, neither of us, would exist. Neither of us deserve to, sometimes.

When I stop looking at the rest of the world all of their hearts collectively stop beating as one - they don’t exist, they don’t exist - but yours-- I’ll be sleeping and I can still hear it, eyes closed and flooded with the orange lights of street lamps burning up the nighttime and I can hear your heartbeat; sometimes I think I know it better than the song of my own. You never stop existing for me and that’s terrifying.

So yes, I know it’s dangerous. Don’t tell me it’s dangerous. I already know. So dangerous that I might burn up completely, swallowed into the gaping jaws of some invisible, nameless sun before I even reach you, before you can even see me, hear me at all. Maybe I don’t exist at all for you. But i think burning up is wholly preferable, significantly safer than swallowing the stagnating air of a summer, once, and wondering if you are wondering about me. Because I think that to exist without actually hearing your heartbeat is worse than not existing at all. 

Tonight, tonight when you open the door and say something predictable and (I would reply, often, with something noncommittal) step in, step in. I’ll lead you into the arms of a despairing empty room, except this time you’ll actually be here and I’ll be able to feel you feeling me.

When we blink twice each it will become morning. So then, well. By then we will have already danced, the sun having warmed the darkness. Drowned us in light.


End file.
